6 ms·

This article is PR at its most effective. An established founder snaps up a fancy domain name and his PR team convinces a reporter that Quora has somehow failed

This article is PR at its most effective. An established founder snaps up a fancy domain name and his PR team convinces a reporter that Quora has somehow failed. I've found no such consensus of Quora having failed as a business (http://www.quora.com/Has-Quora-as-a-business-failed http://www.quora.com/Has-Quora-as-a-business-failed), nor as an expert question and answer site. Anyway, the problem with Fountain is you still have to ask a question. And if you can formulate a good question to begin with, Google (which is fast and free) might very well provide a better answer than some random domain expert willing to answer random questions for small amounts of money.

supjeff 12y ago
I'm working on a social graph of causality, which is meant to solve the problem of having to ask specific questions to find answers. I call it Causemap (http://causemap.org http://causemap.org). Here's something I added today about the militarization of police (http://www.causemap.org/1033-program http://www.causemap.org/1033-program)
- michaelq 12y ago
  This is an interesting approach. So the idea is basically amassing a bunch of people's subjective opinions about causality? Most of the ideas here are really high-level. Also, I tried to submit a "situation" without creating an account and got a 403 js error. You might want to hide that button for unauthenticated users.
  - supjeff 12y ago
    Thanks for the feedback! It still has some rough edges, but I'm really glad to see how people respond to it. It's a combination of a few really new concepts on the web (social news, wiki) and the relatively obscure concept of "causality", so figuring out the right UX/UI for it is my priority right now. > So the idea is basically amassing a bunch of people's subjective opinions about causality? Yes, that's the idea. There's also a mechanism to strengthen the strongest causal relationships through upvoting and downvoting. This way, hopefully the most reasonable links show up on top, but everyone's opinions can be represented.

supjeff 12y ago

I'm working on a social graph of causality, which is meant to solve the problem of having to ask specific questions to find answers. I call it Causemap (http://causemap.org http://causemap.org). Here's something I added today about the militarization of police (http://www.causemap.org/1033-program http://www.causemap.org/1033-program)

michaelq 12y ago
This is an interesting approach. So the idea is basically amassing a bunch of people's subjective opinions about causality? Most of the ideas here are really high-level. Also, I tried to submit a "situation" without creating an account and got a 403 js error. You might want to hide that button for unauthenticated users.
- supjeff 12y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! It still has some rough edges, but I'm really glad to see how people respond to it. It's a combination of a few really new concepts on the web (social news, wiki) and the relatively obscure concept of "causality", so figuring out the right UX/UI for it is my priority right now. > So the idea is basically amassing a bunch of people's subjective opinions about causality? Yes, that's the idea. There's also a mechanism to strengthen the strongest causal relationships through upvoting and downvoting. This way, hopefully the most reasonable links show up on top, but everyone's opinions can be represented.